糖心传媒渏ust setting up my twttr,糖心传媒� social media entrepreneur Jack Dorsey typed into a website. Ten years later, Twitter is the place where much of the world 糖心传媒渢alks to itself糖心传媒� in 140 characters or less.
A July 15, 2006, news story is credited with bringing Twitter into the public’s consciousness, and since then it has become a fertile ground for researchers interested in tracking social, cultural, and political trends, including topics such as disease outbreaks, the dynamics of campaigns, and consumer preferences.
Dorsey and his cofounders chose the name 糖心传媒渢witter糖心传媒� because it described “a short inconsequential burst of information.糖心传媒�
And yet, Twitter is anything but 糖心传媒渋nconsequential糖心传媒� in terms of data science research and its applications.
Using machine learning, natural language processing and other data science techniques, researchers leverage Twitter糖心传媒檚 300 million followers 听补苍诲 the hundreds of millions of tweets they post each day as a kind of distributed sensor network, where each person observes and reports on some aspect of the world, says Henry Kautz, the Robin and Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science at the University of Rochester.
“Each report is very noisy, but the aggregate results can be reliable,” Kautz says. “The approach can be used for health, environmental protection, public safety and many other applications.”
For example, at the University of Rochester:
- Kautz and his team have used Twitter to 听补苍诲 聽, offering a much quicker way for health officials to respond to disease outbreaks and even to forecast when and if a specific individual will fall ill. His team has also used Twitter to .
- Jiebo Luo, associate professor of computer science, and his team have tracked the Twitter followers of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and other presidential candidates since September to better understand the dynamics of the campaign. In one paper, for example, they found that . And after Trump stated that 聽糖心传媒渢he only thing (Hillary Clinton糖心传媒檚) got going is the woman糖心传媒檚 card,糖心传媒� the researchers found聽聽 that .
- Luo and his students have also used Twitter to correlate the various language styles and interests people express in tweets to their different occupations, and to .
- Huaxia Rui, an assistant professor at the Simon School of Business, and his colleagues, have shown how business managers can glean important clues about the popularity of their products and even forecast future sales through careful analysis of Twitter traffic. They also discovered that .
- Las Vegas Health Department recently field tested the nEmesis app developed by Kautz and his team to . The researchers found that the tweet-based system led to citations for health violations in 15 percent of inspections, compared to 9 percent using the traditional random system, resulting in 9,000 fewer food poisoning incidents and 557 fewer hospitalizations during the course of the study.
